Knowledge created by human effort, research, and synthesis is constantly increasing. When people interact by communicating and exchanging information, the information shared between them will increase exponentially. With the vast and ongoing explosion of information within organizations of people of every kind, the task of capturing and sharing knowledge within an organization from volumes of shared information becomes increasingly difficult.
The field of knowledge management has been developed to develop frameworks for knowledge capture and sharing, and to employ strategies for managing knowledge processes within organizations. Explicit knowledge represents knowledge that is captured in a form that can easily be communicated to others. The creation or synthesis of “new knowledge” is continually being added to “established knowledge” captured and shared within a group, organization, or community. One strategy to managing knowledge encourages individuals to explicitly encode their knowledge into a shared knowledge repository, such as a knowledge database, so that they and others can retrieve knowledge provided to the repository. An important tool for encoding knowledge into and retrieving knowledge from a knowledge repository is knowledge mapping in which a visual representation (map) of knowledge objects in a repository is created so that users within a group, organization, or community can visually assess the contents of the repository and access desired content readily and quickly.
One example of a knowledge mapping system is the MindManager™ visual information mapping software offered by MindJet, Inc., having worldwide corporate headquarters located in San Francisco, Calif. The MindManager™ software enables a user to create, add to, and use a knowledge map created for a given theme or subject. A knowledge map is created and expanded by entering labels for topics, subtopics, sub-subtopics, etc., each of which represents a container (file, folder, or repository object) for storing information content related to that label. The relatedness of each topical label to one or more other topical labels is also defined, resulting in a tree or network structure that can be added to, expanded, modified, and re-organized in an intuitive manner using visual click-and-drop tools. Other trees or networks of knowledge containers can be linked and managed in a similar manner. The knowledge mapping is intended to bring visual order to ideas and information by displaying all related topical objects on a requested subject into a single interactive view. A wide range of types of information content, attachments, notes, links, etc., can be stored in a container and viewed using an integrated viewer. Knowledge content can then be visually accessed, acted upon, and/or exported to other applications.
However, presently available knowledge mapping tools lack a convenient way to quickly or even automatically define a topic to be added and/or its relationship to other topics in a knowledge tree or network. They further lack a convenient way to quickly or automatically add information content to an already defined topic and/or its links to other information content in that or other topics in the knowledge tree or network.